Salem Political Snark

Scariest thing about Trump: trashing objective reality

Every day Donald Trump does something that irritates me. But there's One Big Thing at the heart of Trumpism that worries me the most, because there's a danger it will live on after, hopefully, Trump departs the White House in January 2021.

Denigrating objective reality to such a degree, people aren't able to tell the difference between fact and fiction.

There are lots of signs of this happening to a scarily great extent. Here's some of them.

-- Trump decrying "fake news!" at every opportunity, even though the mainstream media is hugely more truthful than the lies that constantly spew from Trump's lips.

-- The Trump administration censoring and silencing scientists, especially when it comes to research involving the environment and climate change. 

-- Trump's demagoguery where he responds to valid attacks on his character by spewing venomous epithets at those who dare to criticize him. Here's a screenshot from my iPhone today that illustrates this. (Bottom tweet came first, then the one above.)

-- Trump's shameless self-promotion where he tries to make everything about him, thereby doing his best to relegate the most important aspects of reality to the background, while he preens and prances in the foreground. Here's an example from the recent mass killing in El Paso. His smiling thumbs-up speaks wordless volumes about Trump's depravity.

A recent opinion piece by Alyssa Rosenberg in the Washington Post added to my worries about objective reality being cast aside -- "I understand the temptation to dismiss QAnon. Here's why we can't." 

I'd been figuring that, as Wikipedia says, QAnon was just a wacky offshoot of the insane Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which claimed a pizzeria was the headquarters of a child trafficking ring led by Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager, John Podesta. 

But Rosenberg discusses in a fascinating fashion how deep the tendrils of the QAnon mentality are reaching into certain gullible sectors of the American citizenry. Excerpts:

President Trump and his allies, including former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, are waging a covert campaign to root out an elite child-sex-trafficking ring. Mass arrests are imminent. John F. Kennedy Jr. is about to reveal that he has been alive all along so he can take Vice President Pence’s place on the 2020 Republican presidential ticket. And a mysterious government official using the handle “Q Clearance Patriot” is recruiting soldiers to the cause.

To most of us, these statements are almost too bizarre to be fathomed. But, for believers in the conspiracy theory known as QAnon, which the FBI recently identified as a domestic terrorist threat, they are important truths. I understand the temptation to dismiss anyone who believes in this wild concoction as merely easily misled.

Such disdain makes it easier to believe that QAnon and beliefs like it remain at the fringes of American life. But to focus merely on QAnon’s content and not the form it takes is to miss why the conspiracy theory has spread so widely — and why similar ideas may prove incredibly difficult to combat.

The best way to think of QAnon may be not as a conspiracy theory, but as an unusually absorbing alternate-reality game with extremely low barriers to entry. The “Q” poster’s cryptic missives give believers a task to complete on a semiregular basis. Even more so than conventional video games such as “Fortnite Battle Royale,” which rolls out new seasons with new scenarios roughly every 10 weeks, QAnon is open-ended — or it will be as long as the revelations continue.

...Once a person has started consuming QAnon content, the actual gameplay is relatively simple. Participants concoct their own interpretations of Q’s gnostic “bread crumbs,” or share those dreamed up by others.

If this were a conventional game, the play might end there. But QAnon players have shown an increasing tendency to enlist the rest of us as unwilling participants in their fantasies, sometimes with violent consequences.

...While most QAnon believers will never engage in violence, part of the appeal of QAnon for participants is that the conspiracy theory assigns enormous significance to even relatively minor acts such as posting on message boards or sharing Facebook posts.

...“It is addictive in the same way that a game is,” says Travis View, a researcher who studies QAnon. By contrast, “conventional political participation” is oriented toward far more mundane processes, and “That all has the impact of what, hopefully getting a state assembly member elected that you feel at best ambivalent about?”

View suggests that “Q offers something a hell of a lot more. You can sit at your computer and search for information and then post about what you find, and Q basically promises that through this process, you are going to radically change the country, institute this incredible, almost bloodless revolution, and then be part of this historical movement that will be written about for generations.”

...It’s one thing to try to debunk QAnon and white-supremacist ideas, whether by trying to prove that John F. Kennedy Jr. is definitively dead or to combat demographic narratives of “replacement.” It’s quite another to figure out how to offer adherents of QAnon and other distorted worldviews experiences that will be as thrilling and fulfilling as conspiracy games have become.

As View put it, we’re living not in a marketplace of ideas but in a “marketplace of realities.” And the tools of gaming have given disaffected people the ability to bend our reality to theirs, whether we like it or not.

A marketplace of realities. Great way to put it. 

Like many progressives, I look back with a strange fondness upon the presidential days of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. 

I disagreed with most of their policies, but at least our disagreements occurred in the same reality. Sure, they fudged the truth from time to time. Every president does.

However, in comparison to our current Reality Denier In Chief, these old style Republicans now seem appealingly reasonable. By  and large, these conservatives embraced the same facts as their liberal opponents. So policy discussions occurred in the same reality, which is essential for productive debates.,

Trump, on the other hand, views everything through a political lens. He doesn't want intelligence officials to tell him what is actually going on in the world. He wants them to tell him what he desires to hear, a very dangerous presidential proclivity.

We're in a constitutional crisis. Yet Dems shouldn't impeach.

A little while ago I watched the House Judiciary Committee vote to hold the Attorney General of the United States, William Barr, in contempt of Congress. This is only the second time in our nation's history that an A.G. has gotten a contempt citation.

It's a big deal. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the chair of the committee, just told reporters that we're now in a constitutional crisis. 

The Trump administration is refusing to honor every subpoena Congress issues. The Trump administration refuses to allow Robert Mueller to testify about the report he issued into Russian interference with the 2016 election, how Trump officials interacted with that Russian effort, and Trump's efforts to obstruct the Mueller investigation. The Trump administration has declared that the entire Mueller Report is subject to executive privilege, which is legal bullshit. 

So this has gone way beyond the usual fights between the Executive and Legislative branches of government. Trump and his cronies are refusing to recognize Congress as a co-equal branch within our republic. 

Plenty of people, including Nadler, if I recall his news conference correctly, are saying that we're well on the way to becoming a banana republic ruled by a strong man who refuses to abide by long-established norms of presidential behavior.

Problem is, our system of government is largely based on those norms.

Sure, laws and the Constitution are important. But equally important has been unwritten norms such as: the president speaks  truthfully most of the time; Congressional oversight isn't stonewalled; a free press is encouraged, not disparaged; subpoenas from Congress are taken seriously, not rejected entirely.

Impeachment is the strongest weapon Congress has to constrain abuses of presidential power.

Yet it is clear that Senate Republicans would never vote in favor of an impeachment resolution sent over by the House. Further, impeachment isn't favored by most Americans, though beginning impeachment-related investigtions is more popular.

Why attempt to impeach, though, when impeachment would never happen? I realize the emotional appeal of impeachment. What Trump is doing is beyond bad. It is despicable. All presidents behave badly at times. Trump is the first president who truly is acting like a wanna-be dictator.

The courts are another check on presidential power.

However, lawsuits by Congress and others likely would take many months, if not years, to be settled. And even if a favorable court decision happened earlier, who is going to make the Trump administration act in accord with it?

Attorney General Barr has sacrificed himself onto the altar of Full-Out Trumpian Acquiescence, like so many other Republicans.

When the head of the Justice Department isn't interested in pursuing even-handed justice, but acts like the president's personal attorney, and the Supreme Court seems to be firmly in Trump's camp, it's hard to be optimistic about the American legal system being a serious check on Trump's dictatorial ambitions.

This is why my reasonable side says focus on the 2020 election, while my emotional side says impeach the S.O.B.

Nate Silver, editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight, had some provocative tweets today that resonated with me. They were in response to someone who argued that Nancy Pelosi isn't being a bold enough leader. 

FiveThirtyEight staff engaged in an interesting chat today on the subject of "Nancy Pelosi is Going After Barr and Rejecting Impeachment. Is That a Smart Plan?" There were good arguments on both sides. Here's the final chat comment.

The big issue, I think, is that the House Democrats have to decide what they’re going to do about their relative lack of power, compared to the executive branch, and they may have to do that sooner rather than later. Pelosi can try to continue to stake out a middle ground, but they are running up against some big structural limitations — and I agree that impeachment lite is not a workable strategy in the long term.

It seems like the central challenge for Democrats is: Can you run on normalcy and basically treat Trump as an aberration? Or do you have to deal with the structural problems his presidency is exposing? The latter, of course, is incredibly hard to do.

By "impeachment lite," I believe this person meant that Democrats do as much investigating into wrongdoing by Trump as possible, but hold off on actually trying to impeach him. The obvious problem with this is that the more wrongdoing that's discovered, the harder it becomes to ignore it -- and accompanying calls from the Democratic base to impeach Trump.

Here's the way I see things. 

I ask myself a couple of questions: (1) What if the Dems attempt to impeach Trump and he wins re-election in 2020? Would I be happy? Answer is NO. I don't want Trump impeached. I want him out of office ASAP. (2) What if the Dems don't try to impeach Trump and he loses re-election in 2020? Would I be happy? YES.  Deliriously.

This shows that, along with most Democrats and a large share of independents, what I most care about is Trump being kicked out off office in the 2020 election. Impeachment is secondary. If it helps accomplish a Trump defeat, great. If it doesn't, not great.

Another way of putting it is, what's the core problem facing our country?

I'm optimistic enough to say that it really is Donald Trump, not a desire among Republicans and Trump voters to refashion our constitutional democracy into a banana republic ruled by a succession of strong men (and maybe women).

So in line with the FiveThirtyEight quote above, I'm inclined to view Trump as an aberration. A dangerous aberration, yes. An aberration who has to be fought mightily, yes. But an aberration that can be out of office in January 2021 if Democrats play their cards right between now and the 2020 election.

Impeachment proceedings would suck all of the air out of the news cycle.

Even if Democrats want to talk about Trump's latest attempt to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, further enrich the already wealthy, engage in unneeded trade wars, screw up our relationships with long-time allies, promote hateful immigration policies, ignore the dangers of climate change, and such, impeachment will be front and center in voters' minds until the Senate votes to absolve Trump.

Which will lead Trump to scream another witch hunt at the top of his lungs just before the 2020 election, most likely.

Instead, I favor the Democrats saying, "We're not going to impeach Donald Trump in Congress. Instead, the voters are going to have the opportunity to remove him from office in November 2020. Yes, we believe he has engaged in high crimes and misdemeanors. We just want you, the American public, to make the decision to deny him a second term."

Here's the most shocking thing Barr said today

If you like the prospect of the United States becoming a banana republic dictatorship where the rule of law doesn't apply to the Supreme Leader, you'll applaud Attorney General William Barr's trumpian display of arrogance, bad faith, and misleading testimony today at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.

But being part of the majority of Americans who want our democracy to remain intact, I found one statement by Barr rose to the top of the OMG! I can't believe the head of the Justice Department just said that! pile, which was teetering precariously by the end of the hearing, the crap Barr said being so voluminous.

Here it is, highlighted in a Slate piece, "William Barr thinks Donald Trump is above the law."

Then, in response to questions from Sen. Dianne Feinstein about why it was that Trump ordered former White House counsel Don McGahn to end the Mueller probe, Barr seems to have again taken the legal position that the president’s anger and frustration over press reports that he had instructed McGahn to fire Mueller somehow made this directive permissible.

Barr seemed to be saying that Trump could not have committed obstruction by asking McGahn to fire Mueller, so long as he was attempting to forestall further negative press. As Barr put it:

If the president is being falsely accused, which the evidence now suggests that the accusations against him were false, and he knew they were false, and he felt that this investigation was unfair, propelled by his political opponents and was hampering his ability to govern, that is not a corrupt motive for replacing an independent counsel.

This is an astonishing claim—that if the president feels that the investigation is unnecessary and is resulting in him being harassed or misrepresented in the media, then the president is justified in taking any action he sees fit to stop it without running afoul of the obstruction laws.

It’s also a claim that was refuted in the Mueller report itself. It’s Nixonian in scope to imply that anything Trump wants to do in order to push back against the media and protect his reputation is legal and justified.

So Barr's right-wing-wacko legal theory is that if President Trump feels he's been falsely accused of something, he can fire those who are investigating the possible wrongdoing without fear of being guilty of obstruction of justice.

This is the dream of every criminal -- to be able to get rid of the police, prosecutors, judge, jury, and anyone else who threatens to bring them to justice.

Your honor, it is my distinct pleasure to inform you that your services are no longer needed in this case, along with the jury, district attorney, and all of the witnesses. In accord with the view of the Attorney General of the United States, I feel that I've been falsely accused and I don't like how newspapers have been covering my trial. So I'm ending this farce.

Before I heard Barr say what he did today, I would have thought it impossible that the Attorney General would hold that if a president thinks he is being falsely accused, he can fire those investigating the accusation with no fear of punishment.

But Barr said exactly that. Which is why I consider this to be the most shocking thing William Barr said today. Unfortunately, tomorrow is another day.

After drenching myself in Mueller report coverage, here's my take on it

For a political junkie like me, today's non-stop coverage of William Barr's embarrassingly awful press conference and subsequent analysis of the redacted Mueller report has felt like taking a really long hot shower that leaves you both blissfully exhausted and pleasantly energized.

I've read the tweets. I've looked over Washington Post and New York Times stories. I've listened to much of what MSNBC had to offer, while fast forwarding through repetitive or uninteresting parts. I've scanned some of the report.

Here's what leaps out at me after the initial coverage of the lengthy Mueller report.

Barr should be impeached. Likely he won't be, but some smart political analysts have suggested this as a seemingly foolproof way for Democrats to get the unredacted Mueller report. It's clear that Attorney General Barr lied in his initial four-page letter about the Mueller report. He mischaracterized the report's findings and is now acting like Trump's personal attorney, rather than as the leader of a Justice Department that serves the American people, not the president.

Mainstream media has been vindicated. Despite Trump's inane claims of "fake news," virtually everything that's been reported about the Mueller investigation over the past few years turns out to have been true. This includes commentators who argued that collusion occurred between Russia and the Trump campaign, and that Trump engaged in obstruction of justice. Both things happened.

Collusion, yes; conspiracy, no. Above is a screenshot from page 2 of the Mueller report. Trump and Barr have been (figuratively) screaming No collusion! However, Mueller made clear that collusion, or even coordination, don't have settled definitions in federal criminal law.

In the excerpt above, he strongly implies that the Trump campaign did engage in actions that "were informed by or reponsive to" actions and interests of Russians, along with WikiLeaks. There wasn't an agreement between the Russian government and the Trump campaign regarding election interference. But there was a heck of a lot of collusion between Russians and people associated with the campaign.

Russian interference in the election is undeniable. Page 1 of the report makes this clear, as shown above. The Russians favored trump and disparaged Clinton. Russia stole documents from the Clinton campaign, which then were released by WikiLeaks.

And there were numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign. Paul Manafort provided polling data to Russians relating to key midwest battleground states that Trump won with the aid of Russian disinformation efforts through social media.

Trump engaged in obstruction of justice. Mueller provides ten pieces of evidence relating to obstruction of justice. Yet he didn't issue an opinion on this part of the investigation. Instead, it's clear from the report that Mueller left it up to Congress to decide what to do on this front, since a sitting president can't be indicted on this charge (or maybe any charge). 

So Barr lied when he claimed in his four-page report that Mueller's failure to say that Trump engaged in obstruction of justice had nothing to do with the fact that a president can't be indicted. Actually, that fact was the main reason Mueller left it up to Congress to decide how to handle the obstruction charges.

Trump encouraged people to lie. He repeatedly tried to get Mueller fired. He did fire Comey, the Attorney General at the time. There's compelling evidence that Trump obstructed justice. Fortunately, he didn't succeed, but not for lack of trying. The only question is how House Democrats should hold him accountable for this.

Impeachment seems more likely, though not inevitable. Until today I'd been thinking that impeachment was off the table for Democrats. However, the Mueller report contains so much damning information about Trump (much of it already known, but not clearly packaged), it's hard to see how Trump should be allowed to get off without further investigations of some sort.

If Congress doesn't serve as a check on how Trump has been abusing presidential power, future presidents will be tempted to further expand the boundaries of criminality and unethical behavior. Sure, politically impeachment may be a bad idea that would help Trump's re-election chances. But holding oversight hearings could be the next best thing. 

Investigations are ongoing. Even a cursory review of the report shows numerous mentions of "Harm to Ongoing Matter," or HOM -- such as this section regarding the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks.

So while Trump may hope that the Mueller investigation is behind him, spinoff investigations continue. Plus, there are several other investigations by both federal and state authorities into possible wrongdoing by Trump and his companies. We're at the end of a beginning, but likely not at the beginning of the end.

Sleaze and bad behavior. All of the evidence in the Mueller report about sleazy, unethical, and generally bad behavior by Trump and his cronies would cause massive headlines in every newspaper if so much of this hadn't already been reported on. There's no doubt that the Trump presidency is deeply flawed, to put it mildly.

Ordinarily, the White House press secretary lying about staff in the Justice Department being pleased with Comey's firing would lead to a firing. Or at least an abject apology. But Sanders lies so often about everything, as do many others in the Trump administration, we've gotten used to this crap -- in line with the frog slowly boiling in water analogy. 

Like a Mafia crime family, Trump has been able to get away with (non-literal) murder because his fingerprints aren't directly on the crime scene. And the Mueller report says that people associated with Trump were able to delete electronic evidence, or hide it on encrypted devices, which made it difficult to investigate certain areas.

Hopefully the Democratic leadership in Congress will be able to find a way to do the right thing for our country, while also doing the right thing for the Democrat 2020 nominee to beat Trump. Impeachment may not be the best option, but doing nothing about the deeply disturbing Mueller report findings also isn't an option.

 

Trump is acting like a dictator. Our democracy is dying.

This is the week that pushed me over the edge of being merely concerned about our democracy surviving, to freaking out about the fact that it truly seems threatened by Trump.

Which is scary. 

Being as old as I am -- 70 -- I've lived through Richard Nixon (Watergate), Ronald Reagan (Iran/Contra), Bill Clinton (blow job, yawn), George W. Bush (no Iraq weapons of mass destruction), and various other WTF-is-going-on scandalous presidential behavior.

But Donald Trump is in a league of his own. And that's not a compliment. He's the only president who has refused to abide by norms of generally decent behavior that have allowed our country to remain a vibrant democracy through good times and bad.

Until now I've read books that disturbed me with the possibilities they raised of what could happen to the United States in these Trumpian times. How Democracies Die. The Monarchy of Fear. An Uncivil War.

After this week's events, my brain has jumped from possibility mode to holy shit we're in deep trouble mode.

I hope I'm wrong. I hope our national institutions -- Congress, courts, public opinion, elections -- are up to the job of keeping Trump from becoming the dictator president he clearly wants to be. 

At the moment things don't look very encouraging, though. Let's count some of the reasons I feel this way.

(1) Most Republicans are willing to let Trump do whatever the hell he wants. His Gallup approval rating has jumped six points to 45% recently. Trump's approval among Republicans is 89%, among Democrats 8%, among Independents 39%. But Trump only considers himself president of his base, not the whole country. So he feels entitled and emboldened.

(2) William Barr, his Attorney General, seems determined to be Trump's personal lawyer rather than an impartial dispenser of justice. He unilaterally determined that Trump didn't obstruct justice after Mueller said evidence of this was equivocal. This week Barr claimed that the Trump campaign was "spied" on even though there's no evidence of this. A hit job on people considers to be his enemies seems to be Barr's goal. And Barr is doing his best to keep the Mueller report as hidden as possible.

(3) Trump wanted Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, to close the border with Mexico, even though Nielsen told him this would be illegal. Nielsen then resigned. Now Trump is putting his cronies in charge of immigration policies. Rather than being embarrassed by reporting that a plan to move migrant detainees to sanctuary cities had been considered, but rejected, Trump now is saying he is seriously considering doing this -- an atrocious and likely also illegal move.

(4) The Mueller investigation was treasonous, according to Trump. He's used that term 26 times. Greg Sargent writes, "Because Trump knows the seriousness of the charge, he therefore must be interpreting treason the way King Henry VIII did, in the lèse-majesté sense: Treason is anything that offends the dignity of the sovereign. Disagreement with Trump is an offense against the state, just as Henry executed unfaithful wives for treason."

(5) Trump reportedly offered to pardon the acting Homeland Security director if he violated the law and was arrested for blocking entry into the U.S. along the border with Mexico. That's obstruction of justice, but since his Attorney General believes it is impossible for a president to obstruct justice, Trump feels free to indulge his dictatorial tendencies.

Maybe this is a low point for American democracy and an upswing is coming. If so, it can't come soon enough for me. We can't wait for the 2020 election to make things right. 

And I've got to say that while until now I've scoffed at Bill Maher's contention that if Trump loses the election he won't leave office willingly, that possibility is starting to seem a lot more likely to me.

Pelosi's smirk made watching State of the Union worthwhile

I've never skipped a State of the Union address, but this year it crossed my mind. Well, just a few seconds of Trump's overly long and mostly boring speech made me glad that I watched it live.

Nancy Pelosi's closed-eyes smirk of condescension, which was preceded by some eloquent eye-rolling, was a memorable moment. It followed Trump's ridiculous claim that the only thing standing between us and prosperity is... investigations into wrongdoing by Trump and his cohorts.

“An economic miracle is taking place in the United States — and the only thing that can stop it are foolish wars, politics or ridiculous partisan investigations,” he said. “If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation. It just doesn’t work that way!”

Hmmm. Interesting bit of illogic.

My literary sensibility says that, in the second sentence above, peace and legislation should be contrasted with -- no big surprise -- contrasting words. War does indeed contrast with peace, but how does investigation contrast with legislation? 

Only in Trump's enfeebled brain, apparently. It could well be that he wrote this line and liked how both words ended in tion. And maybe he really does believe that if Democrats investigate him, there's no way he would sign any bipartisan legislation.

But the first part of his speech was all about coming together, bridging political divides, patching over differences for the good of the country. All that feel-goodness was erased by his petulant demand that unless investigations stop, legislation is a no-go. 

Which made much of the rest of his speech politically irrelevant.

Democrats aren't going to stop investigating all things Trumpian. Neither is Mueller. Nor are other federal investigators in the Southern District of New York and elsewhere. 

So if Trump wants an infrastructure bill, lower drug prices, money to end HIV, family leave benefits, and stronger border security, he's going to have to suck it up and accept that investigation isn't an antonym of legislation. 

Aside from the Pelosi smirk, here's some other things that I enjoyed in tonight's State of the Union address:

-- Seeing the contrast between dark-suited Republican men, mostly, standing and applauding Trump's applause lines while on the other side of the aisle white-clad Democratic women, mostly, sat in their chairs.

-- Watching Democrats look quizzically at each other when Trump spoke words that sounded sort of like something that deserved standing up and clapping for, but nobody wanted to be the first to do this. At first I thought that Dems would follow Pelosi's lead on the standing up front. However, in line with the progressive "herding cats" dictum, fairly early on the Democratic legislators tended to do their own thing.

-- Observing the women in white, who were honoring women's suffrage/fight for rights, stand and applaud each other raucously when Trump noted that more women were in Congress than ever before. What he failed to say, of course, was that many of those women are newly elected Democrats who surfed to victory on a 2018 Blue Wave of opposition to Trump.

Of course, I also spent quite a bit of time screaming "liar" at the TV. Per usual, Trump said a lot of things that weren't true. The Washington Post fact-checkers did a great job cataloging his falsehoods, along with some occasional truth-telling.

The frequent references to World War II, D-Day, Nazis, and concentration camps seemed off-base to me. Sure, these are important subjects. However, they have little or nothing to do with the current State of the Union. Seemingly the veterans and war heroes were dragged out for applause-line purposes, which struck me as wrong. 

As did using the child with brain cancer to buttress Trump's call for $500 million (I think it was) to support medical research in the area of childhood cancer. This from a  president who has been horribly anti-science and wants to do away with the Affordable Care Act without proposing any viable health insurance alternative.

Hypocrisy, thy name is Donald Trump. 

Here's how to tell Howard Schultz "Don't run for president"

If Howard Schultz, the ex-CEO of Starbucks, runs for president as an independent, there's too high a risk that he will siphon off enough votes to enable Donald Trump to win a second term in 2020. 

So here's how to tell Schultz, "Don't run for president." 

There's a Contact Us link on his website, though it isn't very obvious, being at the bottom of the site pages. That's why I'm sharing the link -- to make it easier for people to urge Schultz to hold off on his vanity presidential campaign. It's https://www.howardschultz.com/contact-us

Naturally you can say whatever you like in your message to Schultz. This is what I said:

Please don't run for president as an independent. If you do, there's too great a chance you'll make Trump the winner in 2020. And if you do, I promise that I won't ever enter another Starbucks, and I'll urge everyone I know to do the same.

If you need persuading that Schultz could tilt the 2020 election to Trump, read a New York Times opinion piece, "Howard Schultz, Please Don't Run for President." Excerpt:

There are policies that could potentially break the two-party stranglehold on our politics. Ranked-choice voting, which Maine used for the 2018 congressional elections, lets voters select candidates in order of preference. One by one, the candidates with the fewest votes are eliminated. Their supporters’ votes are apportioned to those voters’ next-highest choice, until someone emerges with a majority.

If Schultz were serious about challenging party monopolies he might invest some of his fortune in efforts to pass similar reforms elsewhere.

Absent such changes, his candidacy would threaten to siphon away enough votes to give Trump a second term.

In 2015 and 2016, Bloomberg, a billionaire businessman whose politics are much like Schultz’s, considered mounting an independent campaign for president. His team looked closely at poll data and focus groups, and found he’d be potentially competitive only in blue states. “All of the results were very consistent,” Howard Wolfson, Bloomberg’s political adviser told me. “An independent with Mike’s profile would have merely resulted in Trump’s election.”

Trump has to be the worst presidential deal-maker ever

For someone who had a book ghostwritten for him called "The Art of the Deal," Donald Trump is a notably shitty dealmaker.

So far in his presidency he's noted for breaking deals -- Paris climate change agreement, Trans-Pacific Partnership, Iran nuclear agreement -- rather than making them. Which figures. Blowing stuff up is a hell of a lot easier than putting stuff together.

The worst thing I can say about Trump is that I consider myself a better dealmaker than he is. And my credentials aren't exactly sterling.

Once I was negotiating with a guy in our carport about a car I was selling. After some talking, it turned out that the guy was the mirror image of me. I was saying, "I feel like the price I'm asking is a bit high," and the other guy was saying, "This car is in such great shape, it's worth more than you're asking."

After we realized the absurdity of what was happening, we laughed and agreed on a price that both of us were happy with.

Which is the essence of a deal, isn't it? Reaching an agreement that makes both sides pleased, even if in reality, one side is getting more out of the deal.

In negotiating with Democratic Congressional leaders about the partial government shutdown and Trump's obsessive desire for border wall funding, it seems clear that Trump has no idea how to handle talks with people who aren't intimidated by him.

This likely is a first for Trump, since he seems to have gotten by in his previous business life by using threats, lawsuits, lies, broken promises, and bravado to get what he wanted. None of those things are going to work with Pelosi and Schumer. They're way more experienced at political dealmaking than Trump is.

What blows my mind the most about his negotiating incompetence is this: he and his Republican surrogates already have made clear how desperate Trump is to get funding for something he can call a "wall." 

News stories have made clear that if Trump can't fulfill this campaign promise (even if Mexico doesn't pay for it), he and his fellow Republicans consider that the chance of him winning reelection in 2020 is low. So unlike a car salesman who tells a customer, "This is my best offer, take it or leave it," Trump has staked out a position of "I'm screwed if I don't get wall funding."

Not surprisingly, Trump's desperation makes Congressional Democrats even more determined not to give him what he so obviously can't live without.

Thus Trump is reduced to making threats about invoking a presidential power to declare a border security emergency, which carries with it a lot of problems of its own. Such as being possibly illegal and decidedly unpopular with everyone but his base, since he'd take money out of the Defense Department budget earmarked for other purposes.

Here's another of Trump's weaknesses that makes him a terrible dealmaker: he lacks empathy. 

Now, taken to extremes this isn't a great attribute for dealmakers. In the car-buying/selling anecdote I shared above, the other guy and I were each overly empathetic. I was visualizing how I'd feel about buying my car, even though I was selling it, and the other guy was visualizing how he'd feel if he was selling the car, even though he was buying it.

But if someone can't put themselves in the other person's shoes, or rather, mind, they're going to have a difficult time getting that person to agree to a deal. 

I'm pretty sure Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are well aware of how badly Trump wants his wall.

However, I'm deeply doubtful that Donald Trump understands how badly Pelosi and Schumer need to hold the line on wall funding -- given the results of the midterm elections where voters overwhelmingly said no way to Trump's border wall fear-mongering.

A compromise on reopening the government seems eminently possible. Yet this requires Trump to do some empathizing that he doesn't seem capable of. Trump needs to take a Democratic "yes" for an answer.

Yes, the Dems are saying, we agree that border security needs to be stronger. They are open to funding a host of border security to-do's, including fencing, so long as nothing looks like what Trump would call a wall. But given how Trump shamelessly lies about everything, he also could lie about an agreement to reopen the government. 

I can picture him saying to his base, "The Democrats want to call it fencing rather than a wall, but we know what they really agreed to: a wall." Likewise, Pelosi and Schumer could say, "Trump wants to call it a wall rather than fencing,  but we know what he really agreed to: fencing."

Both sides have to feel like they won in order to strike a deal between equals. Until Trump realizes this, the standoff between him and the Democrats is going to continue -- with 800,000 government workers stuck in the middle without pay.

Wanted: an entity to save us from Trump. No experience required.

After enduring today's Trump news, which surpassed in scariness anything our Idiot in Chief has brought us since he became president, I'm reduced to viewing this blog post as akin to a message in the bottle.

Yes, I'm that desperate after:

-- seeing the stock market drop almost 500 points (again)
-- having the (competent) Secretary of Defense resign after Trump ordered him to remove all U.S. troops from Syria, a really bad idea
-- observing Trump go back on a promise (no big surprise) to sign a continuing resolution keeping the government open, so it looks like a Christmas Trump shutdown will happen
-- learning that the acting Attorney General refuses to recuse himself from overseeing the Mueller investigation after handpicking people in the Justice Department to advise him on this issue who (predictably) said it was just fine and dandy for him to be Mueller's overlord

I'm a long-time political junkie.

But I've never been so worried about the future of our country, and the world. Trump is the first president in my lifetime who lacks both any sense of morality or decency and is utterly incompetent to manage his own business affairs, much less serve as the leader of the free world.

Worse, Trump doesn't even want a free world. He prefers dictators to democracy, lies to liberty, hatred to helping others. 

Since Republicans seem content to let Trump carry on with his craziness, even if he drags the country down into a pit of economic, cultural, and existential despair, I'm calling out for help to some admittedly unlikely sources.

People of the future, if you've mastered time travel, send someone back to 2016 and prevent Jim Comey from holding forth on Hillary Clinton's damn emails. Plus, stop the Russians from interfering in the election and colluding with the Trump campaign.

Alien beings from an advanced civilization, if you're monitoring blog posts, take this one to heart. Feel free to hover a spaceship over Washington D.C. and beam up all members of the Trump administration to a prison planet in a galaxy far, far away. Then instruct the people of Earth to never let any more narcissistic psychopaths lead a country. 

I hope my fears are misguided.

I hope our country survives the last two years of the Trump presidency. I'm just deeply worried that given what happened today, Trump's descent into total meltdown is accelerating. After all, he still commands the nuclear codes.

Hey, I lived through the Cuban missile crisis. I was an elementary school student in California when we couldn't drink milk for a while because of above-ground nuclear tests in Nevada. I remember when home fallout shelters were all the rage, along with "duck and cover" drills in schools (as if these would work in a nuclear holocaust). 

But this is different.

I've always felt that the leader of our country was competent, even if I vehemently disagreed with his policies. Trump is hugely more terrifying, because not only is he incompetent, he believes in his own bullshit -- and he refuses to have anybody around him who challenges that crap.

In the short-term, we'll muddle through.

I suspect the government shutdown over the $5 billion Trump wants for his stupid border wall will last just two weeks. Once the Democrats take control of the House in January, Nancy Pelosi will pass a bill that restores back pay for government workers and funds the government, minus money for the wall. 

The Senate will go along, ending that problem. Which leaves all the other self-created Trump problems, plus whatever new ones he cooks up between now and then. 

So that's why I'm calling out to time travelers and alien beings. Desperate times demand desperate measures. Someone needs to stop Trump from wrecking our country and a large part of the world prior to November 2020, when I'm confident he will be voted out of office. 

Maybe Democrats and Republicans in Congress, with the aid of Mueller, are up to the job. I'm just worried that they aren't. 

 

Here's what Trump didn't say about the pipe bombs

I'm going to channel my inner Stephen Colbert for a moment.

Today seven pipe bombs were discovered to have been sent to six people: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, George Soros, John Brennan, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and Maxine Waters. Holder was supposed to get a bomb, but it was misaddressed, so it was sent to a fake return address belonging to Schultz.

Because these were all people that Donald Trump has insulted, sometimes viciously, and Trump has called journalists the "enemy of the people" -- Brennan's bomb was sent to CNN, where he works as an analyst -- along with calling Democrats "evil," it was great that Trump apologized at a campaign rally for his incendiary insults, vowing to moderate his tone so as not to add fuel to the fire that led to someone making and sending the bombs.

No... just kidding. Of course Trump didn't do this.

This is the sort of shtick that Colbert frequently engages in -- leading his audience to think that Trump has done something reasonable and presidential for once, then revealing that what he actually did was something quite different. 

One would think that so long as Trump was going to appear at a campaign-type rally in Wisconsin tonight, he'd use that event to bring the nation together after the Democrats, and Democratic sympathizers (that's how I'd characterize Brennan, CIA Director under Obama) were targeted by the pipe bombs.

After all, earlier in the day Trump had said, “We have to come together and send one very clear, strong, unmistakable message that acts or threats of political violence of any kind have no place in the United States of America.”

Somebody else must have written that line for him, because soon after Trump was blaming the media for those threats of political violence, even though Trump bears the most responsibility for inciting violence against those he disagrees with. 

MOSINEE, Wis. — President Trump blamed the media and others for incivility after a string of homemade bombs were sent to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, former president Barack Obama and others, even as he refrained from acknowledging his own inflammatory rhetoric at a rally here Wednesday evening.

...“The media also has a responsibility to set a civil tone and to stop the endless hostility and constant negative — and oftentimes, false — attacks and stories,” Trump said.

In an apparent swipe at Democrats, Trump denounced those who “carelessly compare political opponents to historical villains” and who “mob people in public places or destroy public property.”

The president, who has frequently used nicknames such as “Lyin’ Ted” or “Crooked Hillary” to mock his rivals, called for those in the political arena to “stop treating their opponents as morally defective.”

Every day, it becomes more clear that an egotistical asshole occupies the White House. I really can't think of one good thing to say about Donald Trump. 

He lies incessantly. He cozies up to dictators and disrespects our allies. He exhibits zero compassion. He is acting more and more like an authoritarian. He has no sense of decency. He takes pride in breaking every norm of how a president should behave.

Dana Milbank gets it right in a Washington Post column he wrote today.

What hath Trump wrought?

...Trump recently maligned all the targets of Wednesday’s attack. Thirty-six hours earlier, Trump fired up yet more “Lock her up!” and “CNN sucks!” chants. He roiled the crowd to boo “low IQ” Waters. Trump spread false conspiracy theories that Soros funded the migrant caravan and anti-Brett M. Kavanaugh protesters. After Holder said “when they go low, we kick them,” Trump threatened: “He’d better be careful what he’s wishing for.” Trump called Brennan “a total lowlife” and a “very bad guy” who “disgraced the country.”

...But one public figure’s rhetoric has been more violent than all others, and he has the biggest megaphone.

He encouraged supporters to “knock the crap out of” protesters and offered to pay attackers’ legal bills. He expressed his wish to punch a heckler in the face. He urged police not to “be too nice” to suspects. He shared a doctored video of himself attacking CNN in a wrestling match. He suggested supporters could use guns to stop Clinton judicial nominees and fantasized about Clinton’s security detail being taken away.

Most recently, Trump hesitated to criticize Saudi Arabia for Saudi operatives’ killing of Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi as the president keeps up his attacks on journalists as enemies of the people.

I'll tell you who the biggest enemy of the people actually is: Donald Trump. I can't wait for 2020 to come, so we, the people, can dump Trump.